The present application relates to energy consumption by computing devices. Understanding energy consumption facilitates energy conservation. Energy conservation can be interesting from a macro point of view, such as relative to conserving the world's resources. Energy conservation can also be interesting from a micro perspective, such as relative to reduce overheating of a processor or a bank of servers, or to avoid a battery of a mobile computing device going dead at an inconvenient time.
A computing device can have one or more power management elements, such as screen brightness. Each power management element can have multiple power management settings. For instance, screen brightness might have one power management setting that sets the computing device's display at full brightness while another power management setting sets the screen at a lower brightness to conserve energy. Existing energy consumption techniques are backwards looking, in that they measure past usage under the current power management setting(s) on the computing device. The techniques can then extrapolate the past energy consumption for that power management setting going forward on the computing device. However, such techniques do not offer any predictive value for other power management setting(s) which have not actually been employed on the computing device.